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Rendering is processed on the GPU. Also splitting threads isn't exactly an easy task. Any time you split a task to another CPU you create room for more bugs to creep up due to an increase in code complexity (and race conditions but let's not go there).

I'm talking about software (8-bit) rendering. And thread managing isn't so difficult for an experienced programmer. I did some split-screen routines myself and they work fine.

I've discovered a real-time screen bending effect. Real powerful thing capable to beat shader processing because every screen line may have its own camera coordinates. The effect is very slow though: there are 199 showviews per frame! It's like playing Duke on a 486. Still I think it may be used in some short-term FX like teleporting. To increase performance, the thing may be undersampled to 100 or 50 bands.

good stuff, surely the bands could be brought down enough to have a nice subtle underwater effect

I don't think that's practical. Even if there were only 20 different bands, that's rendering 20 scenes on every screen. I'll bet the framerate would be unplayably low for all but the fastest computers just to have the underwater effect.

Like he was saying, it could be useful in a special situation such as a teleporter effect. And even then, it should be done in a simple area of a map, because if it's a complex scene then the game will come to a stop.

I don't know if it does beat shader processing, but it sure does comes out nicely. Too bad the implementation isn't really suited to interactive framerates. Anyway, such screen distortions is a post-processing effect that's on my Polymer to-do list, so you might see direct CON access for it someday.

I've read the source code of doom, it has a nice screen melting algorithm that doesn't really kill framerate. (or it feels like it doesn't on my machine, I remember the first few seconds of the game being really slow on an old machine with DOS ) So I guess it's doable :/ (I've always wanted to have the screen blow up and then come back with some CON commands; could be really interesting... like you kill the boss and the screen blows into pieces then comes back to it's place after some time with a lightning bolt painting the whole screen to white!!!!)

By the way, don't feel damned I'm absolutely amazed with those It's great to see that CON is indeed capable of LOTS of things :cool: It's just a matter of how you think about things and how you do things.

I've read the source code of doom, it has a nice screen melting algorithm that doesn't really kill framerate. (or it feels like it doesn't on my machine, I remember the first few seconds of the game being really slow on an old machine with DOS :P ) So I guess it's doable :/ (I've always wanted to have the screen blow up and then come back with some CON commands; could be really interesting... like you kill the boss and the screen blows into pieces then comes back to it's place after some time with a lightning bolt painting the whole screen to white!!!!)

In the source code, it's easy to distort the screen in any way. Duke has a screen tilting feature when the scene is rendered to the intermediate buffer and then shown rotated. We can produce a fast bending effect as well.

Rusty Nails, on Nov 5 2009, 12:32 AM, said:

Can this trick be used to simulate heat stemming from valves or fires?

This is difficult, but not for me. :P Since I got WoW effectors showing certain parts of the screen separately, splitting it into several bands will make a slight tremble with appropriate framerate. I'll try to do it today.

I've made a simple heat haze box. So far it needs a bit of troubleshooting to make a proper look when you step onto the box, as well as to let Duke go through it. Here are up to 50 bands distorted randomly, the haze looks very realistic ingame and my framerate is high enough. However, this effect doesn't look that good on a static screenshot, so here I combined four frames into one to simulate persistence of vision.

I think, a nice wavy distortion may be applied to a view through a water surface. I can even try to simulate light refraction including the total internal reflection. This may be a way to immerse the player truly and properly. Now I need to revise my code to make a support for rendering without the auxiliary sector, like the common sector-over-sector effect. This will make possible translucent water shown by a multi-pass effector even when the camera is situated right above the water surface (so far such situations result in HoM).

I had to write a generator program for creating a series of lit slices from a height map and a diffuse color map. Another tricky texturing techniques I'm going to mess around with include fake bump, volume lights and fresnel reflections (utilizing the HDR exposure trick).

That looks like a wall made of voxels. Certainly interesting to look at!

Looks quite similar. Nevertheless, there are no voxels. I bent the wall in the second shot into a curve to show that various deformations may be applied to it which would be impossible with voxels. Also, clipping is a lot better.

One more sample:

Headless_Horseman, on Nov 26 2009, 06:57 PM, said:

This whole mod seems simply amazing : I hope it will run on my old PC...
CraigFatman, what are your actual spec's ?

Read post #26 I think nothing but having relatively fast CPU will be important for the mod.

So far the GUI is incomplete, the controls show no interactivity. I'm going to use only six types of controls: windows, command buttons, checkboxes, option buttons, vertical scrollbars and shapes (decorative elements being shown either as labels, lines, frames or sprites). The most difficult thing here is coding a proper container hierarchy. In my implementation, any control can become a container for another ones.